Even the usual suspects, VMWare, Vagrant/VirtualBox and Homebrew survived the update just fine.
I see no crashes (at least not more than the usual once-every-two-months need to reboot), nor other weirdness. Compared to Mojave, even the random Bluetooth disconnects I had with my Magic Trackpad stopped happening.
Of course this is total non-news and I’m not going to publish a blogpost saying that Catalina is fine for me nor would that reach, much less survive on, the front page of any news aggregator if I actually were to write such a blog post.
Unfortunately, we only read about people having issues and we conclude that everybody must have problems.
> I didn’t even have to debate too much whether I should upgrade or not. The answer is no. The reasoning behind it is quite simple, actually, and it boils down to this: what Catalina takes away from me is more than what it gives me.
And that seems to be the case for me, even though I have no Catalina problems. Lost MS Office 2011 on that machine. Gained... I can’t think of a single thing off the top of my head.
Thus, wish I hadn’t upgraded.
Let's hope it was all worth it and Catalina is indeed a transitional release that serves no other purpose than laying some under-the-hood groundwork for the next release.
I wouldn't say "wish I didn't upgrade" because both my 2018 Mini and 2015 MBP are working fine, but I agree with the general sentiment that from an end user perspective there really isn't any reason to upgrade, and apparently many cases not to considering the issues reported by others.
Now that I'm typing this one thing that Catalina improved comes to mind: I have less issues driving my 5K LG screen through my BlackMagic eGPU. With Mojave, rebooting or losing the GPU connection would regularly result in black screen, and only a complete shutdown and cold restart would fix it. Don't have this problem anymore...
Only complaint is Apple seem to ignore long-standing bugs that have been there for years, like monitors switching around every time you dock your MacBook. They should make a Snow Leopard-like release and clean out their bug tracker.
Much worse is that sometimes (once a month?) during this process macOS completely messed up all my open windows: they are all resized to a tiny size. And I have dozens or hundred of them open. This is horribly annoying, and didn’t happen to me before (in 10.11; I skipped 10.12 and 10.13, for reasons similar to the OP. Before that, I went from 10.8 to 10.11; before that, I never missed a release, often was running beta of the OS etc.; but starting with 10.9, too many issues made this undesirable).
I dread switching to 10.15; unfortunately, I will get a new MBP 16” from work, which normally I’d relish, except that there seems to be no way to use it with anything but 10.15. I’ll see if I can delay it until 10.16 is out and will pray that they started to prioritize bug fixes again, but I have little hope that’ll actually happen.
I've previously had these problems, and they were made dramatically worse on Catalina. Each monitor has about 50% chance of correctly loading in, on what used to be 90%. My USB mouse (which is plugged in to the displayport monitor) also loads the incorrect drivers until I unplug and replug it.
--- Well I take that back. It's been updated since last i used it a few years ago. There is display orientation savings now. It might now solve the problem, but it sure looks to make the fix much easier and faster. Trying it now. Thanks
Another option is to use the left side ports at work and the right side at home.
We actually had a Snow Leopard-like release just two years ago: High Sierra. It had some new features—as did Snow Leopard—but not many. (Lest we forget, Snow Leopard introduced Dock Exposé and Exchange support, just to name two.)
And High Sierra is hands-down the best version of macOS since Mavericks. But afterwards, things regressed pretty quickly.
The real problem here is the annual release cycle. The entire concept of a transitional release is misguided. If it's transitional, keep it internal to Apple until it's ready, and let Mojave live out another year in the meantime.
The AirPlay icon in the menu bar also flashes between Sidecar, Airplay, and nothing at all. I had to remove it for my sanity. Speaking of Sidecar... performance is abysmal. Not on Sidecar itself, which is actually really snappy, but it brings everything else to its knees. Probably because windowserver goes nuts with CPU usage...
My monitor isn't correctly detected when using an eGPU, but it works fine with Thunderbolt. I had to create a custom EDID with known good values for it to work properly. Luckily this was something I could fix on my own.
Oh, and every few weeks Finder will just give up and die, which has the interesting effect of preventing the Feedback application from gathering logs. Nothing will compel it to come back to life and rebooting just sits there. The only way out is to hold down the power button. This one might be SMB related, as I have a lot of shares going on and Finder might not like something that is happening with them at any given time. I've never quite isolated what's going on.
I also get T2 crashes every few weeks. They must be making progress, though, because it seems like every update the crashes get further and further apart.
Other than that... it's the same old macOS as before for me.
I have two external monitors, an Apple 27" and a Samsung 32. Sometimes the mac won't wake up my Samsung external monitor and it needs re-plugging to get it recognised (re-arranging my windows in the process).
Also, if the laptop sleeps and puts the external displays to sleep, when the laptop is then woken up there's a high chance that the non-Apple external display won't wake up in time for the OS to think it's there and it will temporarily remove it, re-arranging my windows again. These issues only happen on my non-Apple monitor, and happened the same when I had a Dell monitor too.
I used to have Finder isses too, though not Mojave related. I solved it accidentally by switching from Chrome to Firefox. YMMV.
Strange about Chrome! I've always been a Firefox user, so I never had that particular issue. Unless the billions of Electron applications count...
Nothing terrible but lacking in some Apple polish.
The access prompts were a little annoying for the first two days but once everything has run and requested access it's fine. A few apps I have had to specifically give Full Disk Access as it seems every update it asks again and again and again.
But like you said stability is as solid as Mojave. However I don't use any legacy 32bit apps or extensions so haven't run into issues with regards to that. I feel most of the complaints I read are related to some old 32bit app which no longer works.
That said, I had been a lifelong PC user until 2015. I decided to buy a Macbook, the first model to use the reviled keyboard. Everything I read online said it wasn’t worth paying a premium for. Nothing I read said buy it. I bought it, and it replaced my 3 monitor PC with no loss of productivity. Everything I did ran better than I had expected (no gaming.) It was a vastly better experience than the Surface Pros I had used prior.
You have to make your own judgements. Most people that used the old keyboard hate the new one. MacOS has issues, but so does Windows 10. I’m comfortable using Linux, but that is a whole other dimension of complexity on keeping everything working (but still vastly better than it was trying to use Linux as a consumer OS in the early 2000s.)
I do however dislike Music. I added iTunes back with Retroactive
I still use Music.app for my Apple Music streaming though.
Other than that, things are fine. Not annoyed by the security, and Apple is clear that they're doing the security and privacy warnings across all platforms (same deal with iOS contacts and locations), so I do appreciate knowing exactly what each app is accessing.
It's embarrassing how long its taking apple to fix this. Apple's audio doesn't exactly treat me well either.
It feels like we're starting to reach a point where linux 'just works' more often than mac.
> The remaining 2% [of messages I've received] are neutral. They’re from people who simply wrote me to let me know they have upgraded to Catalina and ‘survived’, and that they have no issues to report so far.
> It’s interesting to me how — apart from the usual fanboys — I still haven’t seen any unequivocally positive feedback about Mac OS Catalina. I still haven’t found someone saying, Oh man, everything is so much better after upgrading to Catalina. I can take advantage of these new features, and my workflow and productivity are so much improved compared with Mojave or High Sierra. I’ve either read people saying, Yeah, I upgraded and nothing broke, thank goodness, or complaining about something they’ve lost or having changed in a disappointing way. What I haven’t seen is something I used to see more frequently in the past when a new major release of Mac OS X was introduced — enthusiasm.
I think it's safe to assume that 2% statistic is lower than it should be due to response bias—"everything is basically okay" isn't usually worth writing about. But his point about Catalina lacking positives seems very salient.
I think I’ll just stick to Mojave until the next version comes along.
Had similar issues with my 2018 after upgrading to Catalina. After rolling it back to Mojave they all disappeared. For me Catalina has been the worst MacOS release I've seen in 15 years of using Macs.
But I do agree, that there's real no reason to upgrade. "If it ain't broke, don't upgrade"
I think this whole "System <PutYourOsHere> is shit" is more of a user problem than a software problem ;-P
It stops random data exfiltration and ransomware dead. I don’t know why people are complaining about it.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/25/macwoes_google_chro...
You can still install your own bash now, or even continue to run the old, obsolete version. But yes, it won't be the default.
I don't use macOS as pretty UNIX, rather for XCode, testing Websites on Safari, doing iOS stuff.
So when something doesn't get used, the exploits don't matter that much.
> BAD MAGIC! (flag set in iBoot panic header), no macOS panic log available
Having said that, Im curious if these folks went in blindly with no upgrade plan. ANY time you update ANY OS, you should do a bit of recon to know what you can and cannot live without, and take a safety copy of those items. The referenced email shows that maybe the person was a bit careless and over-reliant on the process "just working".
Re: barrage of security pop ups? I see the usual suspects (kernel extension needs approval, can the installer access an external drive, etc) but weren't most of these in previous versions of MacOS? Also, do you want Apple to choose for you? Unfortunately, there is an entire industry of shady individuals, companies and nation states dedicated to exploiting software. I dont think any software vendor enjoys worsening the user experience because the world contains @$$holes. I dont see a way around this for any OS.
I admit I jumped to Catalina on Day 1 but only after taking a backup of what I needed and ensuring I could wipe and revert to Mojave. Surprisingly, even apps that I had that were not Catalina compatible mostly all worked fine. I did lose a few 32 bit apps, but nothing I couldnt live without or didnt have an equal substitute for.
I only use a mail client for work email and that is outlook. I havent used the mail app in 10 years, and it sounds like it was the source of frustration for this user. I do think Apple should do better vetting upgrades.
iTunes split- I don't really notice any difference save for the UI. I dont have strong feelings about this app other than when I forget to specify a launch app for an audio file Im working on, iTunes is the default(I should change that...) and it is SLOOOOOOOOOOOOW to launch. Im guessing the music library database is the culprit here. Maybe they could async that part and just call the music library offline/verifying so that you can play the single file you clicked quickly...
The "Part 1" article in the series addresses this: yes, we techies understand that we need to do this, but most people are not techies. Most users of Macs are not techies. They expect upgrades to Just Work, and they expect their machine to always take care of their data. That's a lot of what they think they are buying from Apple, which is not unreasonable given that that is (or at least used to be) one of Apple's main selling points as compared to Windows: they carefully integrate the hardware and software to make sure everything Just Works.
If Apple is no longer making that guarantee, why would you pay all the extra money for a Mac?
The only issue I have with Catalina is that I can't figure out how to disable password auth for sshd since the config is basically read only now. Ended up using Wireguard and disabling external SSH access.
I was able to do `sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config` then save it
Once saved, it looked like this: https://imgur.com/CGh4cB0
Funny thing is, I tend to forget about the graphics problem, because how often do you print anything with graphics in it? Then along comes a boarding pass and oh yeah other computer.
I also find it annoying that it obsoleted a bunch of my software, like MS Office, and constantly asks for permission to use my Desktop.
But other than that, seems fine! And I do like the new XCode goodies!
It should not have been released in the state it was in at the time.
On my newer laptop, with Mojave I had a few Touch Bar related panics. I think they resolved that before Catalina came out.
My work laptop is Mojave. It still has the issue where it will lock up if I connect the external monitor while it is suspended. And recently it does this thing where the WindowServer task starts spinning and continues even if I kill off all the apps.
There were initially some issues with excess resource use by some system process relating to text input, fans spinning and all. This seems to be gone for a while now.
Two-screen setup with Sidecar is worth it!
I’m sure that people do have legitimate issues, but Catalina doesn’t seem nearly as bad as some previous releases, such as 10.5 Leopard (or Leper as we knew it).
I don’t even mind the security pop-ups - it’s reassuring that not everything has access to anything without my say-so.
Then again, I have a 2017 MBP and none of my daily apps (mostly developer related tools) were all 64 bit compatible from the start.
I imagine other people in certain industries weren’t too happy when their outdated 32 bit applications created by defunct companies no longer function.
You know... plus the normal random osx crash that we're used to. Windows and Linux are more reliable these days on the desktop.
Apple and any hint of problems seem to be clickbait fodder these days. Almost seems like a coordinated pr effort.
Good for you that you don’t have any problems, others do. Regression type problems.
Oh great, other people are having this too. Assumed it was only me.